Friday, May 28, 2010

Friday's Food For Thought: Eat Your Pesticides, Honey

From Garden of Life's Extraordinary Health Newsletter, Issue 91:

Speaking of pesticides…

In 1998, Chensheng Lu, a researcher at the Department of Health at the University of Washington, began testing children in the Seattle area to try to detect pesticide residues in their urine.” Lu was looking for organophosphates, the family of pesticides spawned by the creation of nerve gas agents in World War II. Organophosphates can create mild anxiety, respiratory paralysis, neurobehavioral damage, cancer and reproductive disorders.

The 110 two-to-five-year-olds Lu studied had higher levels of pesticide metabolites (the markers produced when the body metabolizes the chemicals), but one child had no signs of any pesticide metabolites. The difference? That child’s family ate mostly organic. Fascinating, huh? Lu thought so, too, and received funding from the EPA to conduct more research. Here's what they found.

When Lu's research team substituted organic foods for a conventional diet in children for five days, they could find no evidence of pesticide metabolites in the children's urine. When Lu's team reintroduced conventional foods to the kids, however, the metabolites returned.

"The transformation is extremely rapid. Within eight to 36 hours of the children switching to organic food, the pesticides were no longer detected," Lu said.He added, “The level returns immediately when you go back to the conventional diets."